9 Jun
2005
9 Jun
'05
6:03 p.m.
On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 09:47 -0400, Fred Gleason wrote:
[regarding writing full apps in asm]
Today however, I think it'd be a foolish choice.
Modern systems have orders
of magnitude more processing power, and it'd be silly to devote 10x the time
developing an assembly-based version of something that could be made to work
quite acceptably in a higher-level language.
Mmm, yes ... But wouldn't it be nice to have systems that actually *do*
magnitudes more powerful stuff, instead of just doing what they have
always done?
More than 90% of the (running) time is spent in the innermost loops. And
as it happens, the innermost loops are also (considerably) less than 10%
of the codebase.
Me thinks these loops are still candidates for some agressive, take no
prisoners optimizations, no? Especicially given that vectorising can
give a fourfold (or more?) speedup.
OpenGL, FFT, reverb, you name it ... These are all commodities that we
take for granted. But somebody have to write them also, so that we can
actually use them as commodities.
Oh well. Except for the "multiline inline asm" thingie, gcc still works
just fine for me.
mvh // Jens M Andreasen